brunswick station

Very surreal day. Unpredictably beautiful weather. Delay at train station due to a fatality the NJ transit people say, at the New Brunswick station. Trains stop running for over an hour. They evacuate people from the station to allow for the coroners and police to investigate the scene. Then, bafflingly, we’re allowed back up on the platform, where we can see the young woman’s body (a suicide) covered in a white sheet on the other side of the station. People are informed at one point by the police officer to look away, but everyone looks in that direction anyway. Meanwhile, coroners crawl along the train tracks with two plum-colored biohazard bags to collect “remnants” from the collision. No words to describe how disturbing it is. And yet the simultaneity of life continues: an older gentleman wearing a Princeton hat says “Maybe it was one of my students who didn’t like their grade”; another woman is praying and visibly upset; hundreds in the crowd just seem to stare on riveted; meanwhile, the coroners, two young girls, can be seen bantering with police officers and photographers who have to take photos (even joking, at one point). How does one record this all without seeming smug, and not sound as if a judgment is being passed on the gross way in which we make death a spectacle, and we’re all compelled to be riveted, consumed by whatever we can see while we can stomach it? A mass of general confusion persists: at one point the policeman begins to ask people to clear the platform as his radio blurts out “We can’t move the corpse with all these people standing by” — but everyone is only cattled a little bit further down the station, and is meanwhile able to see enough of the details on the distant side of the opposite tracks. The young police officer in sunshades keeps saying “People, the trains will start rolling as soon as we can remove ‘this’ from the tracks. Please keep moving.” It’s an incredibly warm April day — nearly 80 degrees. People are crowded and waiting to get on a train back to Trenton or New York City. The northbound train suddenly rolls backwards into the station, and brings people back toward Jersey Avenue. Finally, a Penn Station bound train appears and carries everyone away, but not before a bunch of people can flood the train cars and look out the windows as we slowly shuffle past the crime scene. People of all ages, backgrounds, temperaments are transfixed. Maybe it’s just the mystery of death — or the sheer entertainment of horror — or the perverse curiosity to see what we don’t want to see. The body, visibly wrapped in a sheet, is being moved from the track as we leave the station. A young kid says “I can’t even see any blood.” Police and official-vested personnel are chuckling out the window. People are talking and sighing and some are being about their business or listening to their music on their headphones. What’s worse, really? Being so glued in like it’s all a reality TV show, or not even bothering to blink an eye? It’s all a spectacle — something not able to be understood (a young woman takes her life by walking into an oncoming speeding Amtrak train at 4:45 PM on a beautiful day). But no one — least of all me — can stop watching. And everyone around me seems nauseating. I know I must be too. It’s the vulgar, vitalizing simultaneity of life (whatever that means) and it’s going on, and it won’t stop, even if the trains do, temporarily. And I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace whose interviews and essays are in my bag. And I’m thinking about his essay on Lynch and how it’s not a Lynchian scene unless the coroners of a crime scene are talking about something mundane and irrelevant and fascinatingly bizarre while they clean up a crime scene. And I’m thinking about how I could ever turn this into a piece of writing and how vulgar and tawdry it would be to even think about something so, what? And I’m thinking about how what if it was me? (“And it would never be me,” we tell ourselves.) And the train’s moving away, and the sun’s still too bright, criminal almost. And someone asks the conductor will their ticket be discounted for the inconvenience.